Gary Brown  Pig and a spud for birthday celebration

Ham, mashed potatoes and corn — that was my birthday dinner every year.

The family followed that birthday meal with a dessert of chocolate cake, with chocolate frosting and chocolate ice cream. I like chocolate.

And, I think, my mother liked it when my birthday fell on Friday or Saturday because I requested rather large slices of this family tradition, and bedtime on my birthday always came long before the sugar high subsided.

The approach of Easter reminds me of our family’s practice of allowing its members to choose the birthday meal. It’s popular to serve ham on Easter. And chocolate candy is readily available.

A pattern is developing here.

NO HAM FOR HIM

My older brother, Dave, went nowhere near ham for his entree. He wanted Swiss steak, smothered in gravy.

“I can see Mom pounding the steak with the meat tenderizer,” wrote my sister, Janice, when we exchanged emails about the memory. “She would laugh and dance at the counter while she was pounding away.”

Dave wanted chocolate for his birthday cake, too. And I didn’t even have to bribe him with any baseball cards for him to order it.

For that matter, my sister was with the family program, as well. Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and chocolate ice cream. Oh, she always had to girlie it up with colored sprinkles, but the rest of us could live with cute to get to chocolate.

For her meal, my sister chose the family’s homemade pizza, which Mom made from scratch.

“And she always had a warm loaf of her homemade bread waiting for me to have a slice when I got off the bus from school that day, too.”

My younger brother, Brian, placed an order for pork chops on his special day each year. “And I wanted mashed potatoes with it,” he remembered. He was independent when it came to dessert. He sought strawberries. Strawberry cake. Strawberry frosting. Strawberry ice cream. I tried to convince him to switch to chocolate frosting — “They dip strawberries in chocolate, don’t they?” — but he wouldn’t bite.

DAD AND MOM

Our parents were as neutral as Switzerland on birthdays. Both of them chose Neapolitan ice cream. Dad wanted a cherry chip cake, but Mom went so far as to make herself an inoffensive marble cake.

“Mom wanted to please everyone,” my sister observed, “and if there was chocolate and vanilla and strawberry in there, everyone was happy.”

Jan remembered as well how our mother would appeal to her children’s individual interests on top of each cake.

“Remember how Mom had those plastic figures you could stick in the cake, along with the candles?” she wrote. “She had horses and ballerinas for me and cowboys and boyish figures for you guys. She used those year after year.”

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Indeed the years have piled atop each other. We have to walk in our minds over a path of decades to get back to this particular memory.

I didn’t ask my siblings if they maintained the tradition. I did. At some point on every birthday, I’ll have ham and a potato of some sort. It may be a ham sandwich and french fries for lunch, but it’s still pig and a spud, so it counts.

Family traditions should count.

“It was a lot of fun for us on our birthdays,” Brian agreed. “It always made it seem special to get to choose the meal.”